Moscow Bound Reviewed By Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com

Wally Wood

Reviewer Wally Wood:
Wally is a a professional writer and a member of the American Society
of Journalists and Authors. He holds a master's degree in creative
writing from the City University of New York as well as a bachelor's
degree from Columbia University where he majored in philosophy. As a
volunteer, he has taught writing in men's state prisons and to
middle-school students in his local library.

His first novel, Getting
Oriented: A Novel About Japan received positive reviews even from
people who do not know him. As a ghost-writer, he has written 19
business books, all published by commercial publishers. He has
recently published The Girl in the Photo which
is currently available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a trade
paperback or Kindle download.

According to his
biographical note, Adrian Churchward lived and worked in Moscow,
Budapest, and Prague as an East-West trade lawyer between 1984 and
1998. He was "one of the few Western lawyers working in the
day-to-day arena of President Gorbachev's liberalization process of
perestroika and glasnost."

Scott Mitchell, one of the
two point-of-view characters in Moscow Bound, is a young British
human-rights lawyer who is living and working in Moscow. When the
book opens, Scott, flying back to Moscow, has just won a significant
case against the Russian army in the European Court of Human Rights
for its crimes in Chechnya. This has had two effects: Scott is a hero
to Chechnyians (which gives him at least a few people he can trust in
Moscow's house of mirrors), and he has pissed off the Russian army
(which removes him from the plane under guard and interrogates him).

Now add a gorgeous young
Russian mother, separated from her oligarch husband (powerful enough
to dine occasionally with Putin). Ekaterina, who with good reason
does not trust the Russian government, asks Scott to help her find
the father she never knew, someone spirited away by the KGB years
before. Scott reluctantly decides to help her.

Now add a second POV
character, Lieutenant-General Pravda of the GRU, military
intelligence. A body has been fished out of the Moscow River, someone
who Pravda knows should not have been in Moscow, someone who has been
assassinated in a particularly suspicious manner. When an elderly
pensioner is murdered in the same way, Pravda, an honest and
patriotic soldier, realizes an explosive military secret is at risk.

The book is a lot of fun
and I gobbled it down. How is it possible for an English human-rights
lawyer, even one who speaks fluent Russian, penetrate the various
circles within circles to find a long-vanished father? What is the
connection between the GRU and the murdered men? Who are the puppet
masters above Pravda and his competitors in the Russian Federation
Security Service? If you can't trust the government, if you can't
trust the police, if you can't trust the military, how can you live?

Moscow Bound may be
Churchward's first novel, but he handles the various threads
competently and his knowledge of Russian life in the 21st century
adds depth and color to the story. I noticed only one or two
unfortunately convenient coincidences among the events, and there
seemed to be one or two threads that he never tied off—although
that may be my fault because I was having so much fun on the ride and
wasn't paying attention. Nevertheless, it's a thriller set firmly in
a world very much like our own, one of my criterion for a book worth
my time.